Ch13 Terms: Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Developmental Psychopathology 📚

Study of changes in abnormal behavior

Neurodevelopmental Disorder 🧠 🧒

• Neurologically based disorder revealed in a clinically significant way during a child’s developing years

• Age & environment important for diagnosis

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

Developmental disorder featuring maladaptive levels of inattention, excessive activity, and impulsiveness

Specific Learning Disorder ✏

Neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by academic performance that’s substantially below what’s expected given the person’s age, IQ score, and education.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) 🗣

Neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by significant impairment in social interactions and communication and restricted patterns of behavior, interest, and activity

Intellectual disability (ID)

• Diagnosis received when one achieves a significantly below-average score on a test of IQ and by limitations in the ability to function in areas of daily life

• Significantly subaverage intellectual functioning paired with deficits in adaptive functioning such as self-care or occupational activities, appearing before 18 years old.

Communication & Motor Disorders

• Closely related to learning disorders, but comparatively benign

• Early appearance; wide range of problems later in life.

Asperger’s syndrome: mild form of autism spectrum disorder

May have a hard time relating to others socially, repetitive behavior patterns, narrow interest range

Language Disorder

• Limited speech in ALL situations

• expressive language (what’s said) is significantly below receptive language (what’s understood); the latter is usually average.

Childhood-onset speech fluency disorder (prev. stuttering)

Disturbance in fluency and time patterning of speech (sound and syllable repetitions or prolongations)

Social (pragmatic) Communication Disorder

• Difficulties with the social aspects of verbal and non-verbal communication, including verbosity, prosody, excessive switching of topics, and dominating conversations

• Doesn’t have the restricted, repetitive behaviors found in ASD.

Tourette’s Disorder

• Involuntary motor movements (tics) like head twitching, vocalizations (grunts), that occur in rapid succession, come on suddenly, and happen in stereotyped/idiosyncratic ways

• Vocal tics often include involuntary repetition of obscenities 🧼

Stimming

repetitive body or object movements performed by those on the autism spectrum

Savant qualities 💯

Exceptional mental ability and skills due to superior working memory and highly focused attention

Echolalia 🦜

repeating the speech of others

De Novo Disorders 🥚

genetic mutations occurring in the sperm or egg or after fertilization

Down Syndrome/Trisomy 21

Type of intellectual disability caused by a chromosomal aberration (chromosome 21) and involving characteristic physical appearance

Fragile X Syndrome

• pattern of abnormality caused by a defect in the X chromosome resulting in intellectual disability, learning problems, and unusual physical characteristics

• mostly males

Lesch-Nyhan syndrome: X-linked gene disorder 🤕

intellectual disability, signs of cerebral palsy, and self-injurious behavior

Phenylketonuria (PKU): Recessive gene disorder

• Inability to break down a food chemical whose buildup causes intellectual disability, seizures, and behavior problems

• PKU can be detected by infant screening and prevented by a specialized diet 🥗

Joint attention

• Attention shared by 2 persons toward an object after 1 person has indicated interest in the object to the other person

• This social interaction is limited or absent in people with ASD